Tag Archives: niconico

I’m a fan of Phil Ochs’ single, Outside a Small Circle of Friends, which has a catchy, upbeat tune, while at the same time being fairy harsh criticism of the current state of social apathy in the United States. Worth a listen for those who have never heard it before, see below:

So you can imagine my delight when I came across something similar in Japanese, in this case a (band? singer?) called あべりょう or Abe-ryou if written in English. You can check out a list of their music for download on iTunes, here, or see their official website, although I personally found the official site clunky and hard to use due to it being a Flash site (damn you Flash websites). Therefore, I’d recommend heading straight to iTunes for further information.

There are also quite a few music videos for their songs available on Youtube, so let’s examine one of my favorites. This song is called 「ナパーム弾」which means “Napalm Bomb.” First, watch the video:

If you don’t know any Japanese, I imagine the video probably seems pretty weird. And if you do know Japanese, you might be thinking, “damn, that’s some harsh stuff.” Let’s go through the lyrics and try to come up with a translation. Luckily, the Japanese lyrics are on the official site, so that makes the translation job much easier.

低所得だっていいじゃない 非正規雇用でいいじゃない 年収三百万円すごいじゃないBeing low income [poor] is ok! Being a temp worker is ok! Making 300,000 yen [30,000 dollars] a year is amazing!

社会のゴミなんかじゃない 道の端っこでいいじゃない 生きているだけとてもすごいじゃないYou’re not society’s trash. Sitting on the edge of the street is fine. Just being able to survive is totally awesome!

ナイスファイト 税金払わない ドンマイ 公共サービスタダ乗りの 邪魔な国民だなんて思わないNice work [literally: fight] not paying taxes. No worries, don’t think of yourself as some useless citizen who leeches off of public services.

無料のクーポン 無料のサンプル お試し体験で 一箇所に集めてナパーム弾[people who use] Free coupons, free samples, and free trials. Gather them up in one place and… Napalm bomb! [blow them up]

無料のゲームに有料アイテム コンプでガチャられて 一箇所に集めてナパーム弾[people who play] Free cell phone games but then purchase all the in-app items, gather them in one place and… Napalm bomb!

キャバクラ嬢でもいいじゃない 風俗嬢でもいいじゃない 従軍慰安婦必要だったじゃないBeing a Hostess club girl is fine. Being a prostitute is ok, too! After all, comfort women were necessary, right?

女性の権利はどうでもいいから場内指名して わめいてるババァにナパーム弾Who gives a shit about women’s rights? Go ahead and pick one out [a woman from a list of prostitutes in a brothel]. As for any whining grannies… [blow them up with a] Napalm Bomb!

職業差別もどうでもいいからとっとと射精して 喘いでるジジィにナパーム弾Who gives a shit about workplace discrimination; hurry up and cum! As for any panting geezers… Napalm Bomb!

慰安婦も兵士もナパーム弾Comfort women and soldiers too… Napalm Bomb!

I can’t say that the lyrics are especially…deep, but they’re certainly edgy and not like what I have ever heard before in a “regular” Japanese song. I linked a few Wikipedia articles in the lyrics of the song in order to provide some additional background info on the political/culturally-specific references, but overall the song is fairly straightforward.

物体SEX(Sex with objects) [lyrics] — About having sex with objects (duh)

There are a lot more than just those, too, so if this kind of stuff catches your fancy, there’s much more on YouTube. Personally, I find some of these songs really hilarious, so if you have a twisted sense of humor, this should be right down your alley. As a warning, however, I mentioned at one point I liked あべりょう to one of my Japanese friends, and after showing him the lyrics, he told me that while it’s fine to mention the songs among guy friends, (typical Japanese) women might not find the songs as funny because the language in many of them is rather discriminatory and beyond the boundary of what is socially acceptable.

Considering that much of American humor revolves around politics and sex, the lyrics in these songs might not be surprising to a western/American audience, but politics and sex are the two topics that typically don’t get covered in Japanese humor (that gets aired anywhere public at least), so proceed with caution before telling any Japanese people—especially girls—that you “know this cool band called あべりょう”. As another Japanese guy mentions on his blog, Nanokamo, regarding the lyrics in Napalm Bomb, 「街中で口ずさんだら白い目で見られること間違いなし」, or “if you walk down the street singing these lyrics, you’re definitely going to attract some nasty looks.”

One final thing I want to mention about あべりょう is that the band seems to be generally disliked by the Japanese net population. I assume this is similar to being dislike by 4chan in the US—so not necessarily mainstream dislike—but first see the following ranking list on Niconico, a Japanese video streaming site.

On both the “monthly” and “total” rankings list, there are four あべりょう songs with the following names:

While the bottom two are the real names of the songs, the first two are not, instead having fake titles likely used to draw attention to the videos. Furthermore, the videos are ranked highly, but this is because on Niconico you can purchase advertising for your video to push it higher in the rankings, even if the video is not popular. In あべりょう’s case, a significant amount of advertising money seems to have been spent, but the music videos still have comparatively few views and favorites, and most comments are negative.

An online thread about あべりょう also reveals that most people are not happy with the group, calling the songs “terrible”, “going too far”, and “having no meaning.” Much of the negativity, however, seems to stem from the excessive advertising and use of misleading titles and tags on Niconico, causing the videos show up in searches unexpectedly and fill up the top rankings list. A lot of the posters are also confused at how あべりょう has so much money to spend on advertising, with some believing the singer to be someone rich and highly connected in politics.

But putting aside the negative forum banter and conspiracy theories for now, あべりょう is certainly an interesting find, and perhaps being non-Japanese I actually like the songs better than a typical Japanese person, despite the fact the lyrics are very much aimed at a Japanese audience. Or perhaps I just have a twisted sense of humor in general.

While aimlessly searching the Internets as I so often do, I came across a Japanese Kanji test aimed at Japanese natives. The quiz purports to test “difficult readings” of certain Kanji, and it doesn’t disappoint. Click here to check it out.

The game is simple enough: a word will appear on screen and you have to enter the correct reading within ten seconds, in Hiragana, to play. There are a grand total of five levels, with five questions each. In other words, get 25 questions correct in a row and you win. Answer a question wrong and the game ends.

Let’s begin:

Quick, you’ve only got 5 seconds left! What’s the answer?

It’s おかみ, of course, meaning a female proprietress of some kind, such as a restaurant or inn owner. But you knew that, right? Perhaps not. Let’s try again.

Haha, why that’s しにせ (although ろうほ is also acceptable), meaning a trustworthy or long-established store that has been passed down for generations. I learned that in my freshman year Japanese 101 class, didn’t you?

I hope my deep sarcasm by now has penetrated through the Internet and into your brain, as these are not “everyday” words, or even words that an average Japanese person would be likely to know without a little effort. And remember that these are level 1 words, with the words getting (supposedly) harder with each level.

The great thing about this particular Kanji test is that it is popular among Japanese internet folks, with quite a few videos appearing online (check out a YouTube search for 漢字テスト) where Japanese people attempt the test in real time, recording their thought process and reactions. I find these fun to watch. For example, the following video is titled “A student preparing for (college) examinations attempts the ogre-level Kanji Test (so hard you’ll laugh)”

He gets fairly far and knows quite a few words without much thinking, but there are still more than a few words in the test that are simply not common knowledge.

The next video (link below) is from Niconico, a popular video sharing site in Japan. In this case the female test-taker in question is, let’s just say, a bit “dumber” than average. You may need a free account to view the video, but I promise you it will be worth it. Be sure to enable Japanese language comments so you can watch her get a Japanese verbal smack-down in real time.

At about 3 and a half minutes into the video the girl taking the test proudly exclaims that the answer is かいせき, only to be completely wrong. The comments that follow include things like「ドヤ顔で間違えんなwww」and 「せめてかいせつじゃないかw」, which mean “don’t act all confident and then get it wrong lmao” and “at the very least you could have guessed kaisetsu lol” respectively (my usage of “lol” and “lmao” here is pretty loose, I’m just translating based on the number of w’s, which indicate laughter in text form).

Of course, if you’re like me, meaning you’re not native in Japanese and not some insane Kanji master dude named Bret Mayer who was the first non-Chinese/Korean person to pass the Kanji Kentei Level 1, then you probably won’t do much better than the girl in the Niconico video. If you attempt the test in front of your Japanese friends or teachers, chances are you’ll only hear things like 漢字が難しいね (Kanji sure is hard) to soothe your pain, which of course it will not.

So how do you beat this test? Well, the obvious answer is “study Kanji,” but getting to the level necessary to answer the kind of questions on a test like this would take years. Unless, of course, you studied all the questions and just all the questions on the test instead.

In which case, Behold! See the following list (warning, it’s 504 vocabulary words):

Just to be clear, I didn’t play the quiz a million times to compile this list. Rather, using a simple .swf (Flash file) decompiler I extracted the list of words used in the quiz and added English definitions for each of them. While it’s easy to look up the definition of a word on your own, I used a combination of not only EDICT, but also 英和／英和辞典, 国語辞典, 類語辞典, and Wikipedia to come to a “more accurate” English definition, or at least one I understood based on the dictionary-provided example sentences and explanations. Your millage may vary, and looking up example sentences or Wikipedia articles is probably your best bet in order to come to your own understanding of an unknown word.

If you were to actually memorize all the words in the list (all 504 of them), you would then be able to totally ace the Kanji test, thereby freaking the shit out of any Japanese person you know as you casually blast through a list of extremely difficult words without breaking a sweat. I know I would spend the hours necessary just for that reaction.

Finally, while the two videos above featured Japanese people struggling with the test, I did find one person who breezed through the test (multiple times) with extreme ease. Some people are scary…

I ended up finding this guy’s blog where he mentions filming himself taking the test—see this link. It turns out he likes to blog about studying Kanji specifically for the Kanji Kentei, and keeps detailed notes about his progress. Not only that, he’s also rather good at Rubik’s cubes, which should clue you in that the guy enjoys memorizing stuff and is good at it too. In short: he’s a bit better than the average Japanese guy when it comes to Kanji. Fear not.